Fossicking

Went to the bathroom block before bed last night and there was so much noise outside! We decided it must be mainly amphibian (prob the much hated cane toad, but possibly the humble frog as there is a creek near by), with added insect chatter as backing. Whatever was out there, they were singing at the tops of their lungs. I met a small froggy thing coming out the block, reinforcing our hypothesis.

Fossicking https://g.co/kgs/8RWs8c

So a leisurely start to the day, enjoying the ‘quiet’ of the countryside or to put it another way, not a lot of human sound effects but a daytime cacophony of critter sounds.

Managed to harness two bars of wifi which allowed us to book our accom next week.

Then we drove off for a gem mine tour. As the town we’re staying in suggests, sapphires are the thing here, so we visited an old mine, adapted for tours. A normal mine would be much narrower, darker and claustrophobic.

Great little tour below ground, with Lia our guide giving us some great snippets of history and folklore as well as the harsh realities of mining for gems, which requires brute force and dogged perseverance.

During the tour we saw some of the tiniest bats ever, who make the mines their home - utterly adorable,

Once we emerged, blinking in the bright light, we bought a bag of ‘unfossicked’ dirt which needed to be:
💎 emptied into a sieve and shaken to get rid of loose sand
💎 dunked in to water and swilled to get rid of sticky dirt
💎 emptied on to a bench
💎 carefully sifted for tiny sapphires and zircons (having been shown what to look for)
We then spent an extremely satisfying (and very mindful), couple of hours picking out gems. Got us quite a (small scales) haul of both sapphires and zircons! We could defo see how gem fever can be all consuming…..

As well as the adorable bats, we encountered a number of other creatures today - see next postRead more